The purpose of the study is to identify those educational and social processes in desegregated, multiethnic elementary schools which are associated with positive educational and mental health outcomes as measured by academic achievement, self-concept, anxiety, education and occupational expectations, attitudes toward school, stereotyping of other ethnic groups, positive identity with own ethnic group, and crossethnic and interethnic sociometric choices. Using a theoretical model based on the theory of equal status contacts, we are conducting systematic case studies to compare the learning environments of thirteen California elementary schools from a universe of 182 desegregated schools on which data were collected during 1973-1974. Public schools presently reproduce in microcosm the unequal status relationships among students, staff, and parents of differing ethnic/racial groups which characterize the relationships among adults of differing ethnic/racial groups in the macrocosm of the larger society. We theorize that these unequal status relationships, replicated in the school, socialize children of differing ethnic/racial origins for unequal adult statuses and are correlated with observed unequal educational and mental health outcomes. We have identified ten institutional processes which we hypothesize are central to producing unequal status: norm-referenced testing, grouping based on academic achievement, individual competition, monocultural curriculum Anglo parental dominance in decision making, Anglo dominated staff, unequal transportation burden, unequal resource allocation, inequalities in normative practices, inequalities in extracurricular participation. We hypothesize that schools which equalize the ten processes for ethnic/racial groups will produce significantly more positive educational and mental health outcomes.